PLEASANTON, Calif., Apr 16, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Zoho today announced the enterprise-grade update of Zoho CRM, the company’s on-demand customer relationship management application for organizations that want to run their businesses online. A video tour of the key enhancements to Zoho CRM is available at http://www.viddler.com/raju/videos/21/. Users who would like to test drive the application without registering can try the live demo at http://zoho.com/crm/online-demo.html.

The latest version of Zoho CRM joins Zoho Meeting, Zoho Projects, Zoho DB, Zoho People, and Zoho Invoice in the growing suite of Zoho business applications. Today’s announcement highlights Zoho CRM’s new enterprise-grade functionality, including role-based security administration, and the new Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition, targeted to medium-size enterprises with complex organizational hierarchies.

“The upgrades we’ve made to Zoho CRM have all been geared toward reinforcing its enterprise capabilities,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “Along with robust, highly configurable security and other enterprise-grade features, we want to give all of our customers — from one-person shops to small and medium businesses — an affordable CRM solution.”

Zoho CRM Enters the Enterprise

To better serve its enterprise customers, Zoho CRM now provides role-based security, letting administrators assign access control to the CRM data based on users’ job roles in the organizational hierarchy. Zoho CRM supports data sharing permissions for complex organizational hierarchies and fine-grained user access control. The role-based security includes:

– Profiles for defining fine-grained access rights to the CRM modules, data administration tools, CRM records, and fields within each module;

– Roles and data sharing rules for setting up multi-level organizational hierarchy and controlling the data-level access rights based on per user’s role within organization;

– Groups (or Teams) for extending data-level access to other users who have similar job profiles or work in the same department or project.

Other new features and enhancements to Zoho CRM include:

Multi-language Support

– Enhancement in customization,

–…

SAN MATEO, Calif., April 17, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ — NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), a leading vendor of on-demand, integrated business management software suites that include Accounting / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Ecommerce software for small and midsized businesses and divisions of large companies, today announced NetSuite OneWorld, a cloud computing solution which enables multi-national and multi-subsidiary companies to manage their global business operations in real-time. For more details on NetSuite OneWorld, please visit http://www.netsuite.com/oneworld

NetSuite OneWorld makes real-time, global business management feasible for the first time by combining a mature, multi-company business application suite with cloud computing delivery. The new release adds a key enhancement to NetSuite’s One System data model to enable multiple companies and subsidiaries to operate in a single database instance. This re-architecture is the biggest product enhancement since the introduction of NetSuite itself, to provide the product’s signature capability to deliver deep and locally/nationally appropriate functionality (currency, taxation, language, reporting, dashboards, etc.) while providing for instantaneous global roll-up, visibility and compliance management. NetSuite’s native Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model enables the OneWorld functionality to be accessed anywhere simply by opening a browser, and eliminates the enormous IT issues associated with traditional approaches to global business management. The combination of the new NetSuite OneWorld capabilities and NetSuite’s cloud computing delivery platform eliminates the cost and technology barriers facing midsized companies operating globally.

NetSuite OneWorld is to date the first and only announced on-demand system to deliver real-time subsidiary management and business consolidation capabilities to mid-market companies for front-office, back-office and ecommerce operations. Prior to NetSuite OneWorld, only large companies willing to spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars could approach such levels of business integration. Mid-sized companies using traditional applications such as Microsoft Dynamics GP (often referred to as Great…

It is a mistake to think that because a customer has expressed dissatisfaction with your product or service they will not come back to you.

They will not return if you handle the situation badly. However, some of your most vociferous complainers could become your most loyal customers because you handled the situation well and treated them with respect.

This means recognizing some essential traits. First, customers want to be respected, and they want attention. They want to be appreciated and recognized. Most of all, they want to be understood.

Losing Customers

Why do businesses lose customers? A survey with which you may be familiar asked customers why they changed suppliers/vendors. Here are the results:

5 percent developed a good relationship with another supplier.

9 percent found less-expensive products elsewhere.

18 percent were unhappy with the service or product.

68 percent left because of the poor attitude of the supplier.

The Lifeblood of Your Business

It is never easy to win new business, which is why we should nurture existing customers and try to minimize problems and inconvenience.

It is a good idea to make regular visits or calls, because spotting trouble early on can help prevent it. Reply to calls/queries as soon as possible. Talk to your customers — find out about them; keep them well informed. Finally, conduct regular reviews of your performance — see your service through their eyes.

Solving Problems

Suppose you have to deal with some difficult customers.

Few people are truly difficult. In any case, it is important to make a distinction between difficult people and difficult behavior, which is often a result of a lack of cooperation on your part.

To combat this, focus on the problem, not on the customer. Show interest in them, which will bring out their likable side. Put yourself in their shoes — remember the important sales concept…

Stories of broken relationships often end with bitterness and reprisals. Zoho, which offers a wide range of software-as-a-service applications, said it had been wooed by Salesforce.com, but rejected its advances. With that relationship dead, Zoho is now taking on the CRM giant mano a mano.

Over the past few months, Zoho has aggressively been rolling out new pieces of its business applications set, such as invoicing, project management and HR functions. Its release of the Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition is designed to make it “easier for medium to large organizations to implement Zoho CRM.”

The company isn’t shy about its goal: to steal away customers from Salesforce.com, which Zoho says it is doing successfully, with one or two customers leaving Salesforce.com for Zoho daily.

Raju Veges, Zoho’s evangelist, told us that he’s seeing firsthand evidence of the migration away from Salesforce.com. “Regarding the migrations from Salesforce, these are the requests coming to us from their users, and in some instances, they are taking help from our support team to migrate their data from Salesforce to Zoho CRM.”

Apparently, those customers like what they’re finding. “Many users who migrated from Salesforce are happy to find similar, functionally rich applications at one-fifth the price. That’s the common reaction we are getting,” Veges said. Zoho claims to have more than 800,000 users.

History Together

Zoho was invited several months ago by Salesforce.com to participate in AppExchange, which would allow Zoho applications to run on the Force.com platform. “We integrated into AppExchange. We were about a week from the release, and [Salesforce.com] asked us not to integrate into their platform, as we compete with them with Zoho CRM,” Veges told us. According to Zoho, Salesforce.com knew about Zoho CRM before the company was asked to participate in AppExchange.

Salesforce.com then offered to purchase Zoho outright. According to a…

All professional salespeople have to be involved in a presentation at some time in their sales career, but when it comes to the enthusiasm that sales professionals have for making a presentation, they broadly fall into four categories:

The Avoider: An Avoider does everything possible to escape from having to stand in front of an audience.

The Register: A Register is also extremely hesitant of speaking in public. They may not be able to avoid speaking as part of their job, but they never encourage it.

The Acceptor: The Acceptor will give presentations as part of the job, but does not seek opportunities to do so.

The Seeker: A Seeker actively looks for opportunities to speak. They understand that anxiety can be a stimulant that fuels enthusiasm during a presentation.

Becoming a Seeker is a prerequisite for sales success! So, how do we get those butterflies flying in formation?

The first thing to remember is that anxiety and nerves mean you are alive — and without them, your resulting presentation would be like you: dead!

What you need to do is learn to control your anxiety and use it to fuel your enthusiasm.

Identifying Fears

To control your anxiety, you must identify what it is that you are afraid of. Is it forgetting your lines? Is it the audience size? Once you have established what exactly you are afraid of, then establish whether or not you can control it.

Imagine you are the captain of an airliner. Do you fear flying? Of course not(although you may fear crashing), because you are in complete control of not only the aircraft, but also the crew and the passengers.

You have a flight plan, and before you take off, you know the payload, weather conditions for the flight, arrival time, departure time, etc. However, what is most significant is that you…